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      Curtain Opened, Heard the Crowd Roar

      By the time I’d got to Norwest Christian College, my high school, I had really long hair and a fringe that went over my face. I joined in Year 7 but didn’t know anyone else because a lot of the kids had gone to Norwest’s primary school together, so I was really nervous at first. It’s always tough when you turn up somewhere and you don’t recognise a friendly face. I guess to everyone else I was the weird guy with the long hair, so it was a pretty lonely time. I didn’t have that many friends until Year 9, and I spent a lot of lunchtimes on my own in the music room.

      With high school it was the same story as primary school. I kept getting into trouble for small-time stuff – being stupid in class, spending too long on my phone, getting distracted. Sometimes I’d even get told off for not wearing the right uniform. At Norwest you would get demerit points whenever you broke the rules, and if you scored five points you had to go to an after-school detention. I think I was in one of those every few weeks.

      Having learned some guitar riffs from Jack, I later took some proper lessons and I would even sit in my room watching tutorials on YouTube. I was becoming completely obsessed with learning how to play. I also loved noisy guitar bands like Foo Fighters and Good Charlotte, so it was natural that I would get to talking to Calum and Michael in school because they were the other outsiders at Norwest and loved those bands as well. The energy and loud guitars of punk made sense to me and the three of us became pretty close once we started going to the same music lessons.

      It’s funny, Michael and I didn’t like one another when we first met a couple of years earlier in Year 7, when I first joined the school. I don’t know what it was – I didn’t really talk to him. It was probably because he was taller than me and he looked more like a man. I’d hang out with Calum a little bit, but I don’t think Michael liked that either, because they were friends. Then, in Year 9, Calum and I covered a song by the band Secondhand Serenade at the school talent show, Live At Norwest. Maybe there was a bit of rivalry with me and Michael because previously he had performed with Calum, I don’t know.

      That show was so nerve-wracking because we had to play in front of the whole school and our voices hadn’t even broken then. That was an awful experience. I’d much rather play in front of 20,000 people than perform in front of the school – all the people that you know and have to live with every day. Still, we got plenty of applause, which felt great, but it was probably only because everyone had to clap. I don’t think the girls went mad, though. We weren’t too popular where we grew up when it came to girls. I was learning that at our school it was much better to be good at sport than be into music. The jocks were the popular kids; punks like us seemed a little odd to everyone.

      Just before Live At Norwest, I had taken the step of recording videos of myself as I covered songs by artists like Bruno Mars and Jason Mraz in my room at home. I’d posted them on YouTube because that was the thing at the time – loads of new songwriters were doing it, so I figured I’d give it a go too. I was 14 and had no idea what I was doing, but suddenly I was getting a few thousand views for each one and people at school were saying nice things about them. I would chat to people who had been listening to my music, but despite the attention, I was oblivious to what it all meant.

      It was shortly afterwards that Michael came up to me. I think he’d seen the songs online and had realised that I liked the same sort of music as him. After the ice was broken, we would hang out in music class, jamming, talking about all the bands we loved until one day he came up with the idea that the three of us should start our own band – something like All Time Low or Blink-182. He figured it would be interesting if we put some songs onto YouTube. I liked the sound of that. Being in a band, hanging out with friends and writing songs sounded so exciting. But I had no idea of what was coming next.

      Michael

      Sitting here at Home

      Wow, looking back I was such a nerd when I was a kid. Most of the time I was stuck in front of a computer screen; because Mum and Dad owned a computer business, they had all the gear, and some of my earliest memories are of playing games at home. I loved it, but luckily for me it was my gateway into 5SOS.

      When I was little, my dad played drums, which is where I must have got all my rhythm from. But when I was around eight or nine, my parents bought me the video game Guitar Hero. Once I started playing I got ridiculously good at it. So good that I thought, Hey! Maybe I should try playing guitar for real ...

      Until that point, I hadn’t really shown any musical talent. We grew up in a place called Quaker’s Hill, which was a pretty OK town – it had a Domino’s Pizza place and a McDonald’s, which was great as I got older, but as a kid it was pretty dull. I was mainly sat in front of a computer screen and there’s even a picture of me, aged about two, playing on a keyboard. I became quite an intense nerd. It’s a miracle I didn’t end up turning into some kind of mad scientist.

      I think that became a problem, because I hated school. I never wanted to go to lessons and often I refused to leave the house. I remember my parents being really angry at me because I wouldn’t go in, even when I was at primary school. I don’t know what it was, but there was something I absolutely hated about the lessons. They sucked. Now we’re in the band and getting up and working hard, I’m fine. Back then, school was like torture to me.

      It wasn’t like I couldn’t do the subjects, though. I went to Norwest Primary, the same as Calum, and then on to Norwest Christian College, the high school. When I was really young, maybe in Year 3, I was placed in the gifted and talented class. I was smart. I was good at English, I was awful at maths, but I understood everything and I could get what the teacher was saying. Still, I hated it. I kept thinking, Why the hell am I in a class that needs me to be smarter when I don’t even want to be here in the first place? Everyone else was so dedicated to school. They were getting all these amazing grades and I was like, ‘Forget this.’ The next year they put me in the average class.

      When I was about 12 or 13, life got a bit tougher for me because the recession happened and it hit Mum and Dad really hard. I was an only child and until then I’d been pretty spoilt, I guess. I hadn’t realised what money was worth because I was so young. I would just ask for things and get them, no problem. Once I’d got into my teenage years and my parents went broke, it made me realise that I couldn’t expect everything to happen for me.

      Now I’m in the band, I appreciate absolutely everything we do together. Every time we’re on stage, I’m happy. Every time we’re meeting fans or signing autographs for people, I make sure I enjoy it, because I know from my parents how hard life can be when things aren’t running so smoothly. Even when I’m tired from all the shows and touring, I tell myself how lucky I am. I got all of that from my childhood. That was a pretty important lesson to pick up.

      Let’s Get Out

      Getting into Guitar Hero made me fall in love with punk, metal and old-school rock. I loved playing along to songs by bands like the British metal band DragonForce and also Metallica because

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